C. S. Bhagya

In this e-mail interview with C. S. Bhagya, Monica Ali gets candid about the language games in her work, the women who populate her narratives, and what compels her to return to writing novels.

You have written across genres, including novels, short stories, and essays, but have returned to the novel quite frequently. What about the form of the novel has allowed you to write the stories you have wanted to tell?

When I was growing up, novels were an escape (from a tense household, from loneliness); they were my only means of travel; they schooled me in ways that school couldn’t. People talk of ‘losing yourself’ in a novel. As an adolescent reader that’s exactly what I was often longing – and able – to do. The more I disappeared, the better. This ability mostly eludes me now, as a reader. The ‘I’ is stubbornly present, asking: How does this work? Why does this not work? As a writer, I think part of the reason I’ll always return to the novel is simply that it allows me to banish the ‘I’ for long stretches when I’m working. By no means all of the time, of course. Constructing a novel also requires the analytical part of the brain to work, and work hard. I enjoy that too. The challenge of it, the intellectual jigsaw. I like the research phase – not least because it’s a hell of a lot easier than the writing. Also, the novel offers the greatest opportunity to go under the skin of others, explore their psychological terrain, their worldview, walk in their footsteps. In other words, create characters.

I recently taught Brick Lane to an undergraduate student and we spent a lot of time unpacking Nazneen’s motivations and the transformation of her life in Britain. We were particularly intrigued by the different registers of English at play in the novel, especially in the letters exchanged between Nazneen and her sister, Hasina, whose acquaintance with the language seems distant at best. We wondered if the correspondence was actually taking place in Bangla, given the difference and remove from ‘standard’ English in their (particularly Hasina’s) letters? 

Yes, you’re right, the correspondence was actually taking place in Bangla. It couldn’t be otherwise, given that we know that Nazneen doesn’t know much English, and have no reason to suppose that Hasina would know more than a word or two. So, the question is: why broken English? It’s not about the logic of translating Bangla to English. Although there is an element of that: Hasina has only a basic education and wouldn’t write at all fluently. But the rendering goes beyond the logic. I was seeking to create her character through the letters, which is the only way in which, as readers, we experience her directly. I wanted to convey some of the naivety, the chaos, the brokenness of her life.

Following from the previous question, how do you negotiate with your characters’ multi-lingual landscapes and lives when you are fitting them into a novel written in English? What kind of linguistic, artistic, and creative translations would you say take place when writing such characters? 

See above! It’s a tricky business. I think if you get trapped in the logic you will please the pedants but quite possibly at the cost of getting closer to the characters. It’s a lesson I took early in my reading life from A House for Mr Biswas – Naipaul renders conversations that would most likely have taken place in Hindi in a kind of Indian-inflected English. But I don’t have all the answers, I’m still groping around to work these things out. You have to feel your way towards the tone, the register, the cadence, the rhythms of each of your character’s speech, no matter what their mother-tongue is, and in the end those considerations – how I hear their voices, which spring from their way of being in the world – are what guide me. Whether that’s the right or wrong approach, I don’t know.

Brick Lane introduces many important concerns, such as the limits of cosmopolitanism in Britain, Islamophobia, and anti-immigration sentiments, among others, all of which continue to be relevant today, perhaps even more so than before because of Brexit. Despite these difficult, dark themes, Brick Lane still ends on a note of optimism as Nazneen reclaims her autonomy in a Britain which appears to promise many opportunities for a woman like her. What kind of stories would you anticipate for a post-Brexit Britain? What would a post-Brexit Brick Lane look like? 

I’ve recently become the Patron of Hopscotch Asian Women’s Centre, a charity which helps women and girls with issues ranging from domestic violence to training in jobs skills. Most of their clients are of Bangladeshi origin or heritage. And if I were writing Brick Lane today and researching it as I did twenty years ago, I’d find many if not all of the same things that were happening back then. For example, staff have told me about how they help some of the clients with practicalities such as handling cash, how to catch a bus, how to order a cup of tea in a café. The challenges come in the form of not speaking English, of being controlled by husbands or other male relatives, of not having ventured out of the community. One difference I’ve picked up so far is the problem of older wives being divorced or abandoned when their husbands, having built up some financial resources after many years of hard work, decide to take a new young bride from the village. I’m sure there would be some other changes if I delved deeper, but I’m not sure they would substantially change a Brick Lane researched and written today.

That’s not to say there aren’t other stories to be written! For example, today I would write Shahana’s story. Or Bibi’s. Where might they be? What might they be doing? I think the answers would be: anywhere and anything.

Princess Diana’s story has been catapulted back into the media limelight because of the latest season of The Crown, prompting questions on privacy, authenticity, and the unreasonable expectations placed on women in the royal family. Could you say something about what prompted you to tell her “untold” story in your last novel? 

A couple of years ago, I was interviewed onstage at British Council literature event. The interviewer expressed surprise that I’d chosen to write about an imaginary English princess. After all, my first book, Brick Lane, was about a Bangladeshi housewife who didn’t even speak English. Would the real (the authentic) Monica Ali please step forward? I said that I understood his surprise. Nazneen, the protagonist of Brick Lane is a virgin bride, she is uneducated, unworldly, has an arranged marriage to a much older man, suffers the scrutiny of the wider community, has an affair but decides that a man is not the way to salvation, and reinvents a new life for herself. The protagonist of Untold Story, on the other hand is a virgin bride, who is uneducated, unworldly, has an arranged marriage to a much older man, suffers the scrutiny of the outside world, has an affair but decides that a man is not the way to salvation, and reinvents herself and her life. No similarities there at all!

That got a laugh from the audience. As I’d hoped it would. There’s an element of my answer that’s a bit tongue-in-cheek. And an element that isn’t. Of course, the protagonists of Brick Lane and Untold Story are also, in some ways, wildly different. But the fundamental motivation for me in writing about Nazneen and Lydia is pretty much the same. Nazneen might easily be dismissed by a casual observer – a brown woman in a sari – and not granted the unique and complex interior life that we all have. That’s the same dehumanizing view that it’s all too easy to apply to celebrities. Diana (who, as you note, was my inspiration for Lydia) was labelled in so many ways. But each individual is more than the sum of her signifiers.

Do you think the publishing industry and the international prize circuits are doing enough to spotlight the work of writers of colour in the UK? What more needs to be done/ could be done?

The publishing industry has been slow to change. But I think efforts are being made, and in the wake of BLM this year, perhaps those efforts will be accelerated. We need more diversity in editorial departments, marketing and sales departments, in literary agencies, and so on. Until that happens, the risk is that changes will be somewhat on the surface.

Could you tell us a little about what you are working on at the moment? 

I finished a novel towards the end of last year. It’s called Love Marriage, and it will be published (so I’m told) in Spring 2022. It’s set in 2016/17, in London, and it’s about two very different families, the Ghoramis and the Sangsters, who are thrown together after a whirlwind engagement. I’m working on the edits for that at the moment. I’m also writing the initial episode of an original television drama. The script has been commissioned by the BBC, but as I’ve learned over the years, most projects fall by the wayside so the likelihood is that this one will too. It’s about the giving and taking of offence. That’s about all I can say about it at this stage!

Has your relationship with writing changed during the pandemic? How has it impacted your thinking about writing stories, your relationship with your craft, and your beliefs about the importance of telling stories? 

No, I don’t think so. I feel grateful that I’m able to continue working when so many others can’t, or have lost their jobs. So far, I have felt zero desire to write anything pandemic-related. But I guess that could change, who knows.

Cite this: Bhagya, C. S. “In Monica Ali’s Worlds.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 13 April 2026.

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C. S. Bhagya

Brick Lane is a novel whose events span decades and wide geographical distances. The narrative focus shifts from Mymensingh District, East Pakistan in 1967 to London and Dhaka in the 1980s and 1990s, and includes the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001, along with its impact on global politics. Ali’s novel tells a story of immigrant life in Britain through the eyes of Nazneen, a young woman who has just moved from Bangladesh after her arranged marriage to a much older man, Chanu. Running in parallel to Nazneen’s story is her sister Hasina’s in Dhaka. Rebellious even as a child, Hasina provides a foil to Nazneen’s fatalism, as she rallies against the future determined for her by her parents.

The narrative unfurls the intimate histories of multiple generations of women in Nazneen’s family, exposing how their circumstances and cultural contexts have shaped their attitudes to life. Hasina’s story shows that women who dare to dream and violate the rigid cultural expectations imposed on them inevitably face social censure and are punished for their audacity. By contrast, Nazneen evolves from a woman who believes in the complete erasure of her choices by the forces of destiny, to one who quietly learns to reclaim her autonomy.

Nazneen’s fatalism, inherited from her mother Rupban, does not get bequeathed to her daughter Shahana, whose personality is instead shaped by her upbringing in a completely different cultural landscape in Britain. The British context also informs Nazneen’s transformation, as she navigates the frequently bewildering hierarchies at Tower Hamlets, where the family lives, and the frightening sweep of London metropolitan life beyond the confines of their low-income housing estate.

Nazneen’s frustration with her husband Chanu’s “boundless doomed optimism of the self-improvement junkie” leads her on a path of sexual awakening and self-discovery. Her relationship with the much younger and more attractive Karim teaches her about her own desires and self-worth. She eventually learns to rely less on the men in her life and become financially independent. 

So that when, at the age of thirty-four, after she had been given three children and had one taken away, when she had a futile husband and had been fated a young and demanding lover, when for the first time she could not wait for the future to be revealed but had to make it for herself, [Nazneen] was as startled by her own agency as an infant who waves a clenched fist and strikes itself upon the eye.

Through Nazneen and Hasina, Ali’s narrative shows how women’s lives and their bodies are entangled in networks of patriarchal and racialised forms of structural violence in both London and Dhaka. Hasina’s letters to Nazneen reveal how her first act of rebellion – elopement and marriage with her lover – has led to a life of pain and exploitation. The words of Hussain, a jute mill worker and Hasina’s acquaintance, capture the vulnerability of impoverished women like her to such forms of unseen but normalised violence after Hasina is unceremoniously fired from her factory job: “Hussain say ‘Sometime when people see a beautiful thing they want to destroy it. The thing make them feel ugly so they act ugly.’”

Ali uses the epistolary (or letter) portions of the novel to trace the passage of time, outlining the mundane and significant aspects of both sisters’ lives as they grow older and wiser in their different ways. These letters not only inform each sister about the other’s life but also emphasise the chasm between them, deepened by time and space, as they continue drifting in different directions. They also offer an important example of how different registers of language are used and examined in the novel.

Hasina, May 1995: “I pass these nights write to you sister. Flat is clean everything in good order. What I can say?”

Experiments with English in the novel underscore how the language works, by turns, as a source of both empowerment and discrimination. English, the language and its literature, becomes a channel of social aspiration for Chanu. Unfortunately, he gets a reality check about the entrenchment of institutionalised racism in Britain when he is continually denied a much-coveted promotion despite years of loyal service to his company. This event also strengthens his abstract desire to return to Bangladesh in search of a more dignified life.

“This is the tragedy,” [says Chanu.] When you expect to be so-called integrated. But you will never get the same treatment. Never.”

Just as her language use reveals the cultural and linguistic diversity of immigrant life in London, Ali also shows how religious identity shapes the experiences of these communities. Nazneen’s and her family’s Muslim identity, already the cause of brewing tensions in their rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood, provokes further discrimination as the existing undercurrent of Islamophobia only escalates in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in New York. In light of these episodes – Chanu’s failed attempts at upward social mobility, and rising instances of Islamophobia in public – it is unsurprising that the seemingly optimistic conclusion of Ali’s novel deliberately rings hollow. A year after Nazneen and her close friend Razia have started their own entrepreneurial venture, a tailoring business, Razia and Shahana take Nazneen to an ice-skating rink as a surprise. Nazneen is reluctant to enter the rink as she believes it is impossible to skate in a saree. In response, Razia says, “This is England… You can do whatever you like.” Ali ends the novel there leaving readers wondering whether that is indeed true.

Cite this: Bhagya, C. S. “Close reading of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 13 April 2026.

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Ed Dodson

In the post-war British context, the term ‘postcolonial’ has often been applied to Black and Asian writers. General surveys of post-war or contemporary British literature frequently use ‘postcolonial’ as a euphemism for ‘non-white’, and this becomes a way of lumping all such writers under one heading.

Andrzej Gasiorek, in Post-War British Fiction (1995), restricts his discussion of ‘colonialism’ to V. S. Naipaul and George Lamming, and of ‘post-colonialism’ to Salman Rushdie. Peter Childs, in Contemporary Novelists (2005), associates ‘Britain’s imperial past and post-colonial present’ with the familiar triad of ‘Rushdie, [Hanif] Kureishi, and [Zadie] Smith’. Nick Bentley, in Contemporary British Fiction (2008), connects ‘the multiethnic nature of contemporary Britain’ to these three, as well as Monica Ali, Courttia Newland, and Caryl Phillips. Brian Finney, in English Fiction Since 1984 (2006), places all of the non-white writers he discusses (Rushdie, Kureishi, and Kazuo Ishiguro) in a section entitled ‘National Cultures and Hybrid Narrative Modes’.

Such literary categorisations are often tied to authors’ biographies. This is true for gender and sexuality as much as for race. Most of the writers above, who are sometimes called ‘Black British’ writers, have their roots in British colonies, past and present. As a result, they are perceived to have a particular investment in ‘postcolonial’ questions of race and empire. This is a perception that is often, but by no means always, true.

Numerous contemporary writers and critics have complained about the ghettoisation of Black and Asian literature within Britain. In Bernardine Evaristo’s words, ‘If you are a black writer you are deemed to be writing about black subjects and that is generally perceived to be for a black audience’. According to Aminatta Forna:

I have never met a writer who wishes to be described as a female writer, gay writer, black writer, Asian writer or African writer. We hyphenated writers complain about the privilege accorded to the white male writer, he who dominates the western canon and is the only one called simply ‘writer’.

There are a number of ways to tackle this question of naming. One is to expand the definition of ‘postcolonial’ beyond the confines of race: to read white writers as postcolonial, too. Several critics have argued that white writers from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (Irvine Welsh or Bernard MacLaverty, for instance) might also be considered postcolonial, or at least brought into postcolonial conversations. A parallel is suggested here between the ‘peripheries’ of the empire and the ‘peripheries’ of the UK, especially in the era of devolution.

An alternative and complementary solution would be, as Timothy Ogene argues, ‘to momentarily de-postcolonize’ the work of writers like Evaristo and Forna by discussing their writing outside of the frames of race and empire.

Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds brings together Black and Asian writers in and around the UK but without foregrounding their racial identities or imposing postcolonial themes on their work. At the same time, as the project title suggests, the term ‘postcolonial’ is not being discarded entirely.

The question we are left with is: what is the role of ‘postcolonial’ as a label today? It is, after all, fifty or so years after the major processes of decolonisation. Is postcolonialism still an effective tool for addressing contemporary writing in Britain produced by a range of writers from many different cultural backgrounds?

Cite this: Dodson, Ed. “The Postcolonial ‘Ghetto’?” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 13 April 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Monica Ali in 2011. Photo: Mon.Ali.1967 (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Besides Brick Lane, Monica Ali’s major works include the novels Alentejo Blue (2006), In the Kitchen (2009), and Untold Story (2011). In each of these works, she turns to a different social context to explore themes of domesticity, immigration, multicultural (dis)integration, linguistic difference, and cultural alienation.

Brick Lane is largely set amongst the eponymous Bangladeshi community in East London and shadows Nazneen, a young woman who has followed her UK-based husband from Bangladesh after an arranged marriage. Alentejo Blue, by contrast, slips effortlessly into a village in the south of Portugal, and tracks the lives and perspectives of an ensemble of characters through an inventive reformulation of the novel into a ‘novel-in-stories.’ Its form shapeshifts between a loosely clipped-together set of short stories and a novel whose membranes stretch between the characters’ interlinked worlds.

In the Kitchen stages a return to multicultural London, retracing the footsteps of Brick Lane, in some ways, but also looks at a broader sweep of characters to de-centre ideas about what constitutes contemporary British culture and identity. Set in a restaurant in central London, the novel manipulates the key metaphor of the kitchen to foreground the contours of this new Britain as a melting pot of flavours—one that simmers its discontents to the surface as frequently as it melds together despite differences. Ali sets up a spectrum of characters whose attitudes range from nostalgia for a bygone, ‘authentic’ Britain, to identification with the changing fabric of social life formed of robust new immigrant communities and movements. In so doing, she offers a carefully distilled meditation on ‘Britishness’ and cultural transition.

Ali’s most recent novel, Untold Story, edges into the realm of speculative fiction, albeit of a wholly unexpected kind. Ali imagines an alternative future for a character inspired by the life of Diana, Princess of Wales (1961-1997), who manages to escape the tragic fate of her real-life counterpart.

A preoccupation with the impact of interpersonal relationships, gender identity, and political change cuts across Ali’s versatile literary output. Women and their tense, constrained relationships with men and the larger world figure as important strands in her narratives, as does a fascination with language and its diverse idiomatic uses across different geographical spaces. Ultimately, as Ali has stated in a 2013 interview, ‘issues of identity, of what constitutes “self,” of belonging and not belonging’ are the pivotal questions which drive her work.

—C. S. Bhagya, 2021

Cite this: Bhagya, C. S. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 13 April 2026.

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